![]() The number-one hit of 1990 was Ghost, a romantic drama that assayed the only barrier greater than that between prostitute and john. Roberts was nominated for her second Oscar, this time for Best Actress, for Pretty Woman the film came in fourth in the domestic box-office tally that year, a rarity for a film released outside summer or the holidays. ![]() His headline, summing up the movie’s decadence and its familiarity, was perfect: “Sinderella.” But this merger of old and new worked, to many moviegoers, in the movie’s favor. But Pretty Woman comes close to finding the least admirable characters to build a feel-good movie around.” Corliss went on to cite, as evidence against the movie, its fusing of utterly predictable beats with age-of-irony noxious characters. Wrote TIME’s critic Richard Corliss: “No one has yet made a romantic comedy in which, say, a toxic-waste dumper falls for a terrorist hijacker. The revision process made Edward and Vivian into guileless figures able to overcome any obstacle, but not every audience member was along for the ride. The final version was much cleaner, if much less realistic. Sure! The whole thing was significantly softened up from the first draft, in which Vivian was a crack addict whom Edward leaves at film’s end to return to his girlfriend. It seems quotidian today, after not merely endless replays on cable but multiple films that got even closer to fantasy, but the Pretty Woman plot is so outlandish as to be a little funny, taken on its own: Edward realizes, after only a couple of days with Vivian, that he no longer cares about his job and decides to tank a business deal. After a few obstacles, the pair end up wiser about one another’s worlds, and, more importantly, together. And yet there’s a real frisson to the story of Los Angeles prostitute Vivian (played by Roberts), who is taken on as a client by wealthy traveling businessman Edward (Richard Gere) and taught to fit into polite society. It’s hard to give Pretty Woman too much credit for its originality, considering that, at its center, it’s yet another revision of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (which also provided grist for the musical My Fair Lady).
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